Artist/Teacher who is an Ultra Runner

pan pastels

I am trying out some new encaustic techniques this week and I have been having a blast. I have been given over the years pan pastels and regular pastels and I wanted to see what would happen if I used them with hot wax. This is not something the “teachers” ever recommend so I TOTALLY had to try it.

For my first technique was to lay some wax down on a clay board. After the wax cooled, I applied the pan pastels with a foam brush and a triangle of foam that is the same as a make-up applicator that you can purchase at any drug store for cheap. After laying down a bunch of pastel on top of the wax I laid down another layer of wax on top and when I was fusing the wax I got the coolest texture. Check it out!

I then painted my raven on top of the fused wax and this is the finished painting. I used extra damar in my black and indigo wax to get a high gloss as well as a thicker wax and was able to get really good height on my bird.

I did this a couple of times just so I could see what the different colors of pan pastels would look like with the wax. The 2 paintings shown above that are the completed paintings after I used technique I spoke about.

I then decided that I would like to try using pastels directly on the board under the first layers of hot wax. This is the image of the pre-wax pastels.

For this board, I decided to use some inexpensive pastel sticks that I had laying around that are super hard and crushed them up in my mortar & pestle and then applied them with the foam triangle as well my gloved hands. Below are the samples of pastels and the mortar & pestle.

It looked cool but it just looked like color pigment under wax so I needed to push it further. I added more pastel on top of what I had already done. I put white pastel on top of the yellow moon and different colors of blue around the moon and then put another layer of wax on top of that. And this is how it turned out. I will be painting some images over this base layer but was really excited about this new technique that I wanted to share it with you.